This file provides information for replicating the results from: Jonathan Kastellec,  Jeffrey Lax and Justin Phillips, 2010. "Public Opinion and Senate Confirmation of Supreme Court Nominees", Journal of Politics, 72(3):767-84.

DATA

There are a number of datasets we used in the paper. A codebook describing the variables in each is available in the file "Codebook.pdf"

POLLS

A list of the polls we used to compile each nominee"megapoll is available in: "list_of_polls_used.pdf"

-- Public opinion on individual nominees.
As described in the paper, for each nominee we compiled a "megapoll." These are all called "[]_megapoll.dta", with each nominee's last name replacing the brackets.

CENSUS FILES FOR POSTSTRATIFICATION

To create the estimates of state-level opinion, we use the population frequencies derived from the “5-Percent Public Use Microdata Sample” in the Census. We use the microdata samples from the 1980, 1990, and 200 census, depending on the nominee:
	-- "poststratification_1980.dta"
	-- "poststratification_1990.dta"
	-- "poststratification_2000.dta"
	
ESTIMATES OF STATE-LEVEL OPINION FOR NOMINEES

The state-level estimates for each nominee, as given in Table 1 of the paper
State-level estimates (Table 1), are in "all_nominees_estimates_of_with_opinion.csv"

A "long" version of the data, which also includes the support of all respondents and the percent of respondents saying do not confirm, in addition to support among those with an opinion (which we used in the paper). This is the version of the data we used in our R script (linked to below), is at "all_nominees_estimates_long.csv".

A "short" version of the same data: "all_nominees_estimates_short.csv"

STATE-LEVEL DATA

The state-level data we used throughout both sets of analyses: "state_level_update.dta"

ROLL CALL DATA
Finally, we merged our opinion estimates with roll call data for senators' votes on each nominee. The data for all nominees except Alito and Sotomayor were provided by Lee Epstein, Rene Lindstadt, Jeffrey Segal, and Chad Westerland, whom we thank. We collected data for the votes on Alito and Sotomayor. The data is in "roll_call_data.dta"

SCRIPTS
All the analyses were performed using R. There are separate scripts for a) creating the state-level estimates and b) merging the estimates with the roll call data and performing the statistical analyses used in the paper and c) creating each graph. Note you will need to install the "arm" library to run each script.

-- Creating estimates: "r_code_for_confirmation_opinion_estimates_replication.R"
-- Merging data and statistical analyses: "r_code_for_regressions_and_graphs_replication.R"
-- Figure 1: "create_figure_1.R"
-- Figure 2: "create_figure_2.R"
-- Figure 3: "create_figure_3.R"
-- Figure 4: "create_figure_4.R"

MERGED DATA
As noted above, we merged the datasets together in R. Here is a version of the merged dataset, which allows for replication our of roll call analyses in other statistical programs: "roll_call_data_with_opinion_estimates.csv"
